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Mobile display space one way to cope with city’s rent crunch that’s making permanent galleries scarcer and sparser.

YTB Gallery uses a van lined with video to show off creators' work for the Images festival. (Vince Talotta / Toronto Star)

By Chris HamptonSpecial to the Star

Tues., April 18, 2017

You’ve seen them downtown: cube vans fitted with outsize LED screens, crisscrossing the core like roving billboards. They’re promoting car dealerships or jewelry or maybe an upcoming Bruno Mars concert.

Advertisers like them because they’re mobile, highly visible and can target multiple audiences. For some of the same reasons, an artist-run centre has partnered with a local film and video festival to hire one, just for an evening, to tour art around Toronto streets.

On April 20, the opening night of Images Festival, Younger Than Beyoncé Gallery will present the video creations of five emerging artists and artist teams screened on an LED advertising van tasked to cruise the city. The van will start at the Royal Cinema at 6:30 p.m., stopping an hour later at Yonge-Dundas Square, then circling downtown until stationing outside the opening party at Niagara Custom Lab for 10 p.m.

It’s a novel idea, sure, but it also responds to some deeper issues. Soaring rents have shuttered spaces, limited opportunities for newcomers, and pushed artists’ studios and galleries farther from the core (and sometimes, out of the city altogether); the itinerant, for-hire screen is a reaction.

In a similar spirit, YTB Gallery will throw an exhibition of installation, sculptural and video works in July presented inside, on and around a corral of U-Haul trucks parked at several locations across the GTA.

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Cultural institutions of every size are themselves trying to reach outside the gallery’s white cube and engage new audiences with creative programming. YTB addresses these challenges — both high rent and attracting new audiences — by being nomadic. The gallery has no permanent home.

YTB co-founder Marjan Verstappen explains that the gallery’s transient character owes partly to “the reality that rent is (at) a premium in Toronto.” Instead of raising lots of money to pay a landlord, she says, the gallery has prioritized paying the artists it exhibits.

Named after the 2009 “Younger Than Jesus” triennial at the New Museum in New York (which showcased the work of artists 33 years old and under), YTB was begun by artist-curators Verstappen and Humboldt Magnussen in 2014 with a mission to promote the work of emerging artists. The pair exited grad school into Toronto’s hypercompetitive art scene, only to be discouraged by uncompensated gigs, pay-to-show galleries and a general dearth of opportunities for the hundreds, maybe thousands, of young artists looking to build careers here.

“I’m generalizing a little, but part of the young artist’s experience is constant rejection,” Verstappen says. “You write a lot of proposals, people hold calls and you apply, and they mostly say ‘No.’”

Verstappen and Magnussen began to host events and performances as YTB to enthusiastic and unanticipated response, so the project snowballed. For their first exhibition, thrown in 2015 in a 3,600-square-foot space lent to them by the Daniels Corporation in Regent Park, YTB received more than 240 submissions.

Tobias Williams, one of the five artists to be featured on the advertising truck, says that’s the gallery’s unique strength: it shows an incredible number of emerging talents. In YTB’s first year, it helped exhibit the work of more than 100 different artists. It’s becoming a launching pad.

Williams, whose art is primarily digital, was drawn to the LED ad van project because he’d reach a different and larger audience than he might usually online or in a gallery. Working with computer animation and digital renderings, sometimes it’s difficult he finds to fit into Toronto galleries; few spaces are dedicated to those practices.

The roving screen, then, represents an exciting opportunity when opportunities seem scarce. The ad truck and the U-Hauls are not, however, seen as long-term solutions.

“We’re not city councillors,” Magnussen says. “We don’t have the power to stop rent from increasing or anything like that.”

Rather, “they’re acts of resistance,” Verstappen says. “They are ways of addressing the issues, but they don’t solve them.”

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